By Dwayne West (TBTNews Service) – Hip hop mogul Jay – Z (Shaun Carter) and urban spokesperson for President Barack Obama, recently stated that hip hop culture has done more for race relations in America the last 30 years than any other individual, genre or movement. And I concur! This of course will disturb some […]
Civil Rights?
By Raynard Jackson – As the two supposed premier civil rights groups gather this week and next for their annual conventions (the N.A.A.C.P and the National Urban League, respectively), I want to challenge their agendas and then pose a few questions for them to answer. When civil rights are discussed in the media, you never […]
In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By Michelle Alexander (NYTimes.com) – The legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites. Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug […]
Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birthday: Is the Drug War the Next Big Civil Rights Issue?
With Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday approaching, we are forced to draw connections between the war on drugs and the disintegration of low-income and black communities in America. As Dr. King so poignantly reminds us in his critique of the Vietnam War, “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” With many communities disparately impacted by […]